Options for Simplifying the Commute

Bicycles at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., help employees get around its expansive campus.Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In November 1974, the newly born Silicon Valley began an ill-fated “dial-a-ride” experiment. A phone call to a team of operators would send a bus to pick up and drop off a rider along a computer-customized route. After the 1973 oil crisis, however, the service quickly became a “success disaster.” The dial-a-ride, created by the Santa Clara County public transit system, groaned under a crush of 80,000 calls a day for weeks and led to busy signals, missed rides and low efficiency. Less than six months later, the service was essentially canceled.

Four decades later, the advent of consumer GPS, the wireless Internet and ubiquitous smartphones has brought the principle of dial-a-ride back, this time as part of a chaotic wave of public and private efforts that combine the idea of “mobility as a service.”

The Internet, which has already transformed a wide range of industries including music and publishing, is becoming a disruptive force among all sectors of the transportation industry. The modern car has rapidly become a mobile computer and sensor, and the flows of traffic have become rivers of sensors, giving rise to a vast range of new transportation-related services.

In Silicon Valley this change can be seen in the convergence of new Internet-based technology and organizational innovation from start-ups, larger technology firms faced with the challenge of moving thousands of employees between home and work, as well as local governments and schools faced with similar challenges.

“We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation that will rearrange the way we own cars,” said Balaji Prabhakar, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor who is a founder of Urban Engines, a Silicon Valley start-up intent on improving mobility by using data science. “We won’t have to worry about how we get to work or how we get home.”

Ride-hailing and alternative taxi services like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have been joined by a raft of newcomers. Split, a ride-booking service, and Bridj, a “pop-up” microbus system, both started recently in the District of Columbia. And smartphone apps like RideScout, Urban Engines and Citymapper try to make it possible to blend disparate transportation systems.

“The ubiquity of smartphones is creating new transportation ecosystems that can scale,” said Steve Raney, a transportation planner at Cities21, a consultancy based here. “When it arrives, a two-car suburban family can sell one of them and rely on a smartphone for travel, and an urban millennial will never have to buy a car.”

One question posed by such services is whether they are merely skimming riders from already underfunded public transit systems. Santa Clara County Valley Transportation Authority executives note that 20 percent of the workers who ride the private tech fleets between San Francisco and Silicon Valley would have otherwise used public transit. The dark outlook presented by the explosion of private transit systems is that an elite class of tech workers will be moved in style, while the overall quality of transit will decline.

“In Silicon Valley only one out of every thousand travelers is moved by Uber or Lyft,” Mr. Raney said. “They have huge market caps, but they don’t move the needle” in the overall transportation crisis.

The future of transportation with fewer private cars can be seen in many parts of the world. Helsinki, Finland, for example, has adopted the ambitious goal of a car-free city and intends to create a point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by 2025. The vision is to use smartphones to weave together on-demand minibuses, driverless cars, bikes and conventional buses to make it possible to make any trip without a private car.

In Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, the North Bayshore neighborhood is a suburban technology center that includes NASA’s Ames Research Center and well-known tech companies like Google and LinkedIn. The region is characterized by endless avenues of low-slung office buildings that are surrounded by acres of free parking and miles from the nearest rail station.

Yet despite its suburban sprawl, a little more than half of North Bayshore’s 21,400 daily commuters drive to work alone — a remarkable figure, given that nationally about three out of four commuters drive to work alone, according to census data. The difference here is a mix of public and private transportation services — from private technology buses and public rail lines to Uber and Lyft cabs — that employees stitch together to make trips that often stretch dozens of miles in a day.

Google, the city’s largest employer and North Bayshore’s largest tenant, transports about 35 percent of its local work force on private shuttle buses that run across the San Francisco Bay Area. It is an expensive perk that not every company can offer. About 10 percent of Google employees ride bikes, and the rest either car pool or combine the CalTrain commuter rail with a local shuttle from the Mountain View station.

Photo

Bridj, a “pop-up” microbus system, offers an app, to help individuals and businesses with transportation.Credit Katherine Taylor for The New York Times

“Google’s drive-alone rate now matches that of San Francisco, in a place where there is effectively zero public transportation and nothing but office parks,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal in the San Francisco office of Nelson/Nygaard, a transportation consulting firm. “The case study is so compelling that it is changing the way the industry works.”

Certainly, the buses have proved to be a political flash point in San Francisco where fears of tech-oriented gentrification have become a deeply dividing political struggle. And some urban planners worry that new mobility services may ultimately encourage suburban sprawl. Silicon Valley technology workers who once might have chosen to live close to their employers now have the choice of living in Santa Cruz, San Francisco or even Marin County. From a congestion perspective, however, the tech workers have a far smaller impact in buses than they would if they commuted in cars.

In addition to providing free bus service, Google and office neighbors like LinkedIn and Intuit try to eliminate every reason to drive to work alone. For bikers who want to freshen up after the ride in, there are showers and towel service. All three companies also offer an emergency ride program so that employees can get a lift home in the middle of the day when the shuttles are not running.

For doing errands during the day, LinkedIn has nearby ZipCars, and Google has a fleet of about 80 electric loaner cars that charge under solar-powered canopies. “We don’t want your needing a car during the day to be the reason why you drove in the first place,” said Brendon Harrington, Google’s transportation manager.

Google is also building a public, pedestrian-only “Green Loop” so that its employees can get between its miles of buildings without having to drive. The company owns or leases the equivalent of three Empire State Buildings worth of office space in Mountain View.

This year, Google will begin an even more ambitious experiment, a street test of a small fleet of self-driving cars that will be limited to 25 miles per hour and make short trips around its campus and Mountain View.

While such vehicles will be prohibited from traveling routes with higher speed limits, they are likely to be well matched for dense urban areas and campus settings. For example, in cities like San Francisco and New York, average traffic speeds are below 20 m.p.h. In 2013, a study done by the Earth Institute at Columbia University showed that robotic taxis would cost considerably less to operate than human-driven vehicles.

At the same time, entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley and elsewhere around the country have begun experimenting with new business models and different scale — buses instead of cars.

In addition to the private bus fleets ferrying tech workers throughout the region, some new private transit services are open to anyone. And RidePal, a company that runs plush, Wi-Fi-equipped buses for several employers including LinkedIn, also sells its extra seats to anyone who needs a ride. One-way tickets are $12 —comparable to commuter rail lines in the area — while monthly passes are $200.

“Tech workers are not too hot on driving out to suburbia anymore,” said Martin Alkire, a principal planner for the City of Mountain View. “A lot of cities are really struggling with how do you attract a talented work force into a suburban environment.”

Start-ups like Leap and Chariot, both in San Francisco, and Bridj, in Boston and Washington, have begun bus service on both fixed routes and more flexible routing, which echoes the Santa Clara County dial-a-ride venture. In this case, however, they offer perks like comfortable seats, Wi-Fi and juice bars.

Also in Washington, the company Split has recently begun operating. Split is based on technology pioneered in Helsinki by a private-public partnership that created that city’s Kutsuplus (“call plus”) ride-hailing service, a modernized version of the dial-a-ride idea.

Mountain View is trying to push North Bayshore’s share of drive-alone commuters even lower, to 45 percent, in hopes of adding more jobs but fewer cars. As part of a redevelopment plan, Mountain View now requires that future North Bayshore developments come with a plan for how the tenant will meet the 45 percent target, and the city can take steps to fine companies whose plans do not measure up.

The precise outlines of the Internet-driven change are still uncertain, but it is clear that technology will transform the way people move from place to place as deeply as cars changed transportation when they went into mass production.

“The private car may have only 10 or 20 years left in its life,” said Gil P. Friend, chief sustainability officer for the City of Palo Alto.

Correction: June 17, 2015An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a bus transportation start-up in San Francisco. It is Leap, not Leaf.

A version of this article appears in print on 06/11/2015, on page F2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Options for Simplifying the Commute.